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1. Your job. Yes, even if you’re working something that other people condescendingly term “not a real job,” such as retail or service. If you have a job of any kind in this economy, you’ve already won.

2. Whether or not you have debt. If you managed to get out of your education debt-free, that doesn’t mean that your life is a financial walk in the park that you constantly have to be apologizing for. If you are in debt, it doesn’t mean you got a “worthless” degree and now deserve to be shamed for struggling to find work after you were convinced by your school that you were making a good decision.

4. Your decision to have children, or not have them, or to not be sure if you even want them.

5. Your dislike for marriage as an institution — and even if this one day changes, you don’t have to justify having grown as a person and moved into a new point of view. No one should be telling you “I told you so” over something as enormous as your decision to commit for life to another person.

6. Your sexuality, or your desire to experiment with it. You are allowed to have “phases” or “try things out” or be “confused,” and can take as much time as you want figuring it out.

7. Your gender presentation.

8. Your income level, and what you can and cannot afford. If you are having trouble keeping up with friends because you are not able to spend as much as them, there is no reason to risk financial ruin to try and keep up appearances.

9. Your body. The only person whom you need to talk to about with it is your doctor; everyone else can else can go kick rocks.

10. Whether or not you want to go out on a weekend night, or ten weekend nights in a row. The amount of time you spend in a bar or at a club does not directly correlate with how cool or worthy a person you are.

11. Your relationship status. If you’re single and happy, that’s great. If you’re in a relationship and happy, that’s great. If you’re either of those and not happy, you are more than allowed to be, and it’s no one’s business how you should “fix” it unless you ask them for their advice.

12. How many friends you have. One is enough. A hundred is enough. And there is no need to falsely upgrade acquaintances to “friend” status in your mind simply to fill out the ranks. A true friend is rare, and we don’t need to make it a competition for who has the most.

13. How much you drink when you go out, or if you drink at all, or why you choose not to drink if you do.

14. What kind of music you enjoy listening to.

15. What kind of an education you have or don’t have, or if you intend to go back and finish what you’ve started. If continuing your studies is something you want to do, good, but don’t be forced into saying that you want it just because it’s what people expect of you.

16. What you happen to be turned on by. If you like slash fiction, you like slash fiction. If you like people recording videos of themselves popping balloons, that’s awesome for you. It’s all good, and as long as you’re not hurting anyone, have at it.

17. Whether or not you know to cook, even if you’re a woman who “should” know how to do those things.

18. If you stay at home to raise your children, or if you hire someone to help you do so because you have a full-time career. Neither of those choices are more or less feminist, no matter what Elizabeth Wurtzel tells you.

19. How many people you have had sex with.

20. Whether or not you are a virgin, and whether or not you want to wait for marriage to lose said virginity.

21. Whether or not you believe in God, and what you think God actually is. (As long as you’re not imposing any of your beliefs on others, in which case we’d have a bit of a problem. But I trust that you’re cool and wouldn’t do that.)

22. Who you voted for and why. If you want to talk about it, you’re free to. But no one should ever make you feel like you have to tell them.

23. If you have sex on a first date, if you kiss on a first date, or if you won’t even hold hands on a first date. You’re allowed to do whatever you like when you’ve just met a new potential suitor.

24. Whether or not you choose to use dating websites.

25. Not knowing exactly what you want to be when you grow up, even if many people would already put you in the category of “grown up.” If you are considering going back to school, or changing careers, or moving, or starting a family, or doing charity work — it’s all good. And none of it has to be followed up with a longwinded explanation about why it’s a good idea and they should believe in you. If you need to justify what makes you happy to someone in your life, perhaps you should ask yourself why you even care about their opinion in the first place.

Most SEOs failed to identify the most important metrics to their campaign, others only focused on getting Links that they forgot the importance of traffic traffic and conversions.

In order to measure the effectiveness of your SEO campaign, you have to identify what are your Key performance indicators or KPI. Below are the 5 most important key metrics for SEO:

Keywords – The phrases used by Google to determine the relevancy of a website to the users search query.

Keyword is basically the heart and soul of Search Engine Optimization. If you want to be found in Google, you have to identify what is your target keyword. Basically it is the search terms or queries from users who are looking for a particular product or service. SEOs use these keywords to optimize a website, for example keywords should be placed in the websites content, in the Off-page SEO strategy keywords are used to build links for the website.

Links – The output of the team’s day-to-day Link Building initiatives.

This metric is important to SEO because this is the main output of their work. Optimization involves ‘Links’. In order to optimize a website, you have to build links on a daily basis because it is still the main signal that Google used to determine which site ranks first in the Google SERP.

Rankings – The position of the Keywords in the Google Search Engine Results Page (SERP)

This metric is very important to SEO because it is the indication whether the strategy or efforts from the team is successful or not. Rankings are determined by checking the Keywords position in the Google SERP. A page 1 ranking for a particular keyword means many visitors to the site. The higher the rankings the better.

Traffic – The total number of hits or visits from the users/customers

For SEO, Traffic is the output of a Keyword Ranking in Google. SEO’s definition is the process of driving traffic to the website. It is the most important metric in an SEO campaign and is measured by using tracking tools like Google Analytics and Web-stat.

Conversion – The total number of leads generated from the user/customers

SEO doesn’t end in Traffic. In fact, traffic is useless if you cannot generate sales or leads out of it. Conversion is the ‘Goal’ of every website to make profit. A conversion can be known as a Lead, Purchase or Sale, Download, or just simply a Website visit.

There are lots of network out there that offers Paid links like Linkvana and Text Links Ads but the strategy below seems to be working well with link buyers. Here are the 5 steps:

1. Check SEO technicalities (e.g. PR, relevancy, spam content, etc.), Check if the site is a good place to get a link.

2. If the site is okay, Look for a good spot to put your link (keyword).

3. Once you select a page, contact the webmaster and make negotiations (you have to pay for the link).

4. If all good, then it’s time to put in the link.

Preferably, the link should be placed in the middle of a paragraph in the selected page.

The link has to appear seamless in relation to the whole article. This means even if the page is all about fire and the client site is about pepsi (so ‘pepsi’ is the keyword for example), in the middle of the paragraph spammers write something like “While filming a Pepsi commercial, Michael Jackson’s hair caught on fire.”

I just wanted to share a strategy called Blogger and Social Outreach Strategy. It’s another form of Relationship Building for links but you are not going to offer article like Guest Post. This strategy is more on real engagement.

Unlike Guest Posting where you send emails, this one uses Social Media to interact with the webmaster, blogger or writer. The strategy starts from searching of blogs or news related to your service or product. Once you find some related blog post, you will now going to get their social profiles like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.

Connect and engage with them. Take a look at my sample below, this writer is from a well know site CNET:

The article is about Smartphone and since cashforsmartphones.com is related to it, I get the writer’s social profile and engage with her.

Last Friday, October 12, 2012 I received an email from Google congratulating me about my completion on their Power Searching with Google course.

My score is 100% LOL. Well, I already know most of it so it was easy for me. I just took the course to learn more and to improve my searching skills. I find the course useful and informative specially for beginners.

I like the way Matt Cutts explained the crawling, indexing and ranking stuff. On the video he explained How Google decide which page or documents they really want to show in the SERP. He also give some of the 200 signals that they use to rank a website. Some of them are by asking questions like:

How many times does this page contain your key words?

Do the words appear in the title? In the URL (web address)?

Do the words appear directly adjacent?

Does the page include synonyms for those words?

Is this page from a quality website? Or is it low quality, even spammy? What is this page’s PageRank? That’s a formula invented by our founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, that rates a web page’s importance by looking at how many outside links point to it, and how important those links are.

You can watch the full video here:

I hope there’s more FREE courses like this in the future. I learn more from the course and more important is that I enjoyed the class!

It’s actually pretty easy because I’m used to most of the methods or the topics that were discussed. The course focus more on How to become an effective Google searcher. From basic to advance.

Based on what I have remember on the course, here are some cool tricks that I learn:

Using “site:” operator to search for domains with whatever you want. Example: searching for .com domains, you can type in Google search bar( site:com <terms> or site:.com <terms>)

Using “filetype:” operator to search different file type formats. If want to search .CSV file for Tax computations, you can type in Google search bar ( filetype:.csv tax computations )

Using “define” operator to define terms that you don’t know. (e.g. define amazing)

There are many interesting operators you can use in Google and you can learn more about it here.

The other interesting topic from the course that I like most is “Using Books to verify a Quote” Most of the time you read quotes or hear quotes from your friends, co workers, etc. But you are not sure if they say the exact or correct quote or reference. For example earlier during our training session at work, the presenter mention this quote in his Powerpoint: “When all think alike, no one thinks very much” – Walter Lippman

I find the quote interesting and search it in Google. I want to verify if Walter Lippman really said that exact quote so I search it in Google. The result is confusing, as you can see below the 1st quote says “Where” and the other says “When“:

So for me to know what is the real exact quote between the two, here’s what I did based on what I’ve learn from Google Power Searching Class:

I do a search query in Google using this intext:”When all think alike, no one thinks very much” OR intext:”Where all think alike, no one thinks very much”

I click to Books on the left side of Google to filter Book References

Here’s the result:

If you noticed the bold terms in the image above the books mention it as either when or where. What’s interesting about it is that you now know that the first word of the quote from Walter Lippman is either “When” OR “Where” and not just “When” as mentioned in our session before.

Even the books aren’t able to tell what’s the correct phrase so I guess only Walter Lippman can answer whether it’s “When” or “Where” ;)

What I mean about this post is that you can search, filter and verify results and facts using Google. Not all information you get from the internet is true that’s why it is important for you to verify that information. Use news, books and compare the results. Think and Analyze data carefully :)

Face the air conditioner. If you have a photographic memory, try to remember the usual number the thermostat switch is pointed at for the last few years. If you don’t own one, retrieve the most recent electric bill you have just paid. Look at the section wherein a small bar graph is drawn with the months under the falling or rising bars. If you are spatially inept, just look at the amount of paid credits and compare it to some of the last few months’ bills. Clearly, that small piece of paper is a perfect testament of the slowly manifesting effects of a worldwide problem: Climate Change.

Climate Change has nowadays become a glittering generality environmentalists utter in vehement protest against the destructive behavior of mankind. The term only took waves at the onset of the 20th century, signaling the massive revolution of modernity branded as another big leap under the elbow of human civilization. For us, unwitting humans, the glory of mankind is yet on the brink of unfolding, but for the ecologists, we seem to be going downhill into the pits of devastation. I used to read this malignant term only on science textbooks and forlorn documentaries sitting on our coffee table: now it has generated a great force field that has finally shaken us and our sleeping sensibilities. The dramatics has risen into an unmitigated clamor. And we can hardly cover our ears.

Climate Change cannot be interpreted by mere descriptions of polar icecap melting, or migratory birds losing their way, or crabs and fishes, either in hyper hibernation or worse, dying states. It cannot be managed by putting more trees or by passing up ordinances on clean and healthy living in the neighborhood, or sending Al Gore to different places in the world to exude his charismatic aura while preaching about greenhouse gases and it effects, or too much carbon on the depleting ozone layer (I learned in our course: Earth and Environmental Science that carbon is one of the most abundant elements found on earth since the beginning of time, together with nitrogen, argon, and oxygen. That means no sweat about that!) In order to solve this, we must get to the heart of all things. We need to examine if we are promoting the common good of humanity or we are just allowing our inordinate desires to take over our whole selves.

I have an analogy to make: we always laugh about how stupid bulls are when they encounter the wise matador. They dash and attack wildly and untiringly, only to be killed by the matador afterwards. They always go after that red cape not knowing that the real enemy is the one holding and swaying it. They do not know that if they put down the matador, they are putting an end to that annoying flutter of the red cape. Likewise is the case of the Climate Change mystery: close the wounds of everyman and we will have a better place to live in. We don’t need someone like Michael Jackson to constantly remind us of that.

Climate Change, and all its entailing complications, is a stigma on man’s morality; it cannot be solved by odd campaigns and silly legal resolutions.